I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
Booker T. Washington (1911)
The term ‘race’ … is a fiction but it is not entirely a fiction. It is a social fiction built around something that we might call population or lineage and those things are real biological phenomena whereas ‘race’ is polluted by politics. … A one-drop rule is obviously a political phenomenon not a biological phenomenon.
Bret Weinstein
Racism is the belief that races exist. … Racism is the belief that there is some sub-specific, naturally occurring population within Homo sapiens that exists between the level of the species and the local breeding population and those are called ‘races’. I have often said to people that every time you hear the word ‘race’ think ‘unicorn’, because it’s the same thing.
Adolph Reed
We humans, as a global species, have had at least five great “out of” migrations. We are in the midst of the fifth, the out-of-the-countryside migration. In 1500, around 5 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. Now, around 60 per cent do and moving to cities has generally been accelerating over time.
The four preceding major “out of” migrations were:
Out of Africa. In a couple of waves, around 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged from Africa and spread across (eventually) every continent except Antartica. If their spread across the Americas is any guide, they expanded their territory at a rate of around 10km a year. They absorbed and replaced every other genus Homo species on the way through, becoming the only biped primate left standing. (“Absorbed and replaced” is, of course, something of a euphemism — there was rather more replacing than absorbing.)
Out of the River Valleys. In a series of expansions, starting around 10,000 years ago, wherever farming was invented, waves of farmers spread across the arable lands (typically expanding at a rate of around 1km a year), absorbing and replacing the foraging populations. The genetic record suggests rather more replacing than absorbing, farmers and foragers having very different patterns of life and skill requirements.
The foragers generally lived distinctly healthier existence than the farmers, but farming increased the ability to extract calories from the landscape by up to 100-fold, so the sheer numbers of farmers overwhelmed the foragers. The last continent this process reached was Australia, with the beginning of British settlement in 1788. The process is still underway in some parts of the world.
Out of the Steppes. Starting around 5,000 years ago, the original Indo-Europeans began to expand out from the Pontic steppes. They were pastoralists who had domesticated the horse, had the wheel and axle, used wagons and expanded across the steppes at about 10km a year and across Europe at about 5km a year. They eventually reached all of Europe (except the Basque Country and Sardinia), Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, northern India and northwest of China. About 4,000 years ago, they invented the chariot, which increased the extent and rate of expansion.
They were patrilineal kin groups of related warriors who replaced a lot of the men in the conquered areas and absorbed the women into their societies. (To speak very euphemistically.) They were also mutants. They were lactase persistent: they could consume milk as adults. Being able to raise animals for dairy permitted them to extract perhaps five times as many calories from a given amount of grassland than just raising animals for slaughter, a huge biological advantage that could not be copied.
Out of Europe. Starting around 1500, Europeans expanded into the Americas, across Siberia and later into Australasia, absorbing, replacing and dominating the local populations, creating a Eurosphere extending across four continents and a significant part of a fifth. The exporting of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas greatly aided this expansion.
This, the fourth great Out-of migration, was an interactive mixture of state expansion and settlement. It was by far the fastest expansion of the four and the only one by cultures that only recognised single-spouse marriages. (Until very recently, it has been far more common for cultures to permit polygamy than to ban it.) These Euro-Christian cultures lacked strong kin groups but had, in replacement, developed a very flexible range of cooperative social mechanisms. With the most successful cultural group, the Anglosphere, displaying even more persistently the relatively high levels of political bargaining that developed in Northwestern Europe in particular. Political bargaining that tended to expand over time and spread to other cultures.
Why that state-and-settlement pattern of expansion? The institutional variety between competing states within Europe led to the evolution of unusually effective states, as that variety gave the selection processes of history far more to work with. Especially as there was enough cultural similarity to make successful mechanisms by one state easier to observe and adopt. The combination of institutional variety and competition also encouraged accelerated technological development.
The geography of Europe was probably a factor. It meant that European states were insulated from steppe invasions and their empire-encouraging, institution-flattening effects. The geography — lots of mountain ranges and peninsulas, no dominating central plain — was, once the social technology of state-building had spread beyond the Mediterranean littoral, antipathetic to a unifying empire, keeping the institutional and technological innovation going. A colder climate may have encouraged more interest in technology.
Non-kin cooperation is a key element of Homo sapien success as a species. It turns out, that if your societies put non-kin cooperation on steroids, you can end up dominating the planet. Until, of course, other people start copying your tricks.
There are those who hold that the low melanin count of those spreading out from Europe makes the fourth of the great Out-of expansion a particularly evil Out-of sequence. This is nonsense, the Europeans were just acting like Homo sapiens. Or, indeed, any species population with exploitable advantages seeking access to greater resources.
If someone waxes eloquent about all the dreadful things that happened in a particular history, congratulate them on noticing that it is, indeed, a history of Homo sapiens. Also be a bit wary. History provides a rich source of information and understanding. Separating us from that enormous information source by presenting us with some narrow caricature of history (of either the oh-so-heroic or of the oh-so-tragic variety) is a great mechanism to deprive people of the basis for critical judgment and thus to disorient, and so dominate, them.
Of course, there can be a sort of grandeur in being the scion of a heroic history or a righteous critic of an oppressive one. Conversely, accepting the being-Homo-sapiens nature of a history can be distressingly mundane.
We can trace this enormous scope of history, including the dynamics of European history, without mentioning race. This is because race is an analytically useless concept in understanding this history. Until we get to ideas that evolved during this history.
A concept in people’s heads
Race is a concept in people’s heads, and what is in people’s heads affects their behaviour. But why is race a concept in people’s heads?
Once upon a time, race was about ethnicity. People in Europe might talk of the Czech race, or the German race, as they would of nation or tongue (meaning language group). Early medieval chronicler Regino of Prüm (d.915) defined ethnicity in his Chronicon as:
Diversae nationes populorum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.
For those (such as myself) that are not up on their Latin, that translates as:
The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.
Ethnicity does obviously matter in understanding how people might see themselves and others, how they might behave, and so on. To the extent that the term race ever makes much analytical sense, ethnicity can usually be substituted for it just fine, as ethnicities are local breeding populations with large elements of common culture. (Complicated by the fact that people can choose to adopt cultures and cultural identities.) Especially if we adjust Regino of Prum’s definition slightly to substitute norms for laws, as all ethnicities have norms but not necessarily specific laws.
The descendants of American (i.e. US) slaves are an ethnic group. A result of ethnogenesis happening in a new continent within the direct gaze of history. Afro-Caribbeans are a different set of ethnic groups. Recent African immigrants to the US are from a different set of ethnic groups again.
Ignoring its more prolix late C19th and C20th “race science” versions, race in the modern sense refers not to ethnicity but to, in effect, continental ancestry. To express this in the classic colour-coded way, whites come from Europe, blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, reds from the Americas, yellows from East Asia and browns from the Middle East and South Asia.
Notice how the only generally acceptable colour markers for race left are whites and blacks. A matter for deeply sceptical contemplation in itself. Notice also that these are not breeding populations with a common culture; they are geographical aggregations containing within them a wide range of local breeding populations and cultures. They do have some (extremely fuzzy) physical markers due to facing broadly similar evolutionary pressures (especially pertaining to sun exposure and so melanin count) and (outside of Africa) specific ancestries from bottleneck events. (The Americas, for instance, was originally settled by a population of maybe a few hundred people.) But these continental aggregations do not match actual genetic lineage patterns.
People are quite accurate in picking their own continental ancestry, but that is not surprising. One is likely to have some idea which continent (or continents) one’s ancestors came from. Nor does the ability to pick our continental ancestry quite accurately mean that continental ancestries are other than geographical groupings of various local breeding populations. (Folk are not as accurate in picking out their ethnic ancestry.)
So, in what circumstances do we want to analyse people by such broad continental groupings of ancestry? In no instance that makes serious analytical sense. Cultures and history matter, after all, but they vary widely across and within continents. But we might engage in continental-wide generalisations if they are useful for some other reason. Perhaps we want to explain, and/or justify, how people from one continent end up dominating people from other continents. Or because we want to have an excuse to engage in mass slavery against people of a particular continental ancestry.
Slavery creating race talk
The latter turns out to be exactly where the first serious ranking of people by skin colour came from. Except it does not come from within a “white” group but a “brown” one.
The original practitioners of mass slavery, the Romans and the Greeks, did not need to engage in moralised categorisation by continental ancestry for two reasons. First, their slaves came from a wide range of sources. Including people who looked exactly like them.
Second, they were not adherents of a universalist morality; they did not conceive of everyone as having a shared moral identity and common moral status. This matters, because they could simply categorise slaves as “losers” and that was the moral end of the matter.
If, on the other hand, you have a universalising morality, then clearly slavery, reducing people to property, is an offence against the notion that we are all moral beings sharing a common moral identity. So, some moralising story has to be told to explain why this group could be enslaved, could be so dramatically exempted from the moral status and protections granted to everyone else.
Any such story is not going to be a positive one for those targeted for enslaving.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle did write about “natural born slaves”. Aristotle’s ethics had a universalising tendency, so he was forced to give some moral story about why some people were slaves and others weren’t. But there was no ancestry basis for this, as patently people from all and any ethnicity or ancestry could and did end up as slaves.
The Romans generally regarded such natural-born slave theorising as Greek silliness. Of course there was no natural justification for slavery. Hence freed slaves could become Roman citizens. (I.e. be promoted to winners.) In fact, Rome operated one of the most open slave systems in history. (A nice discussion of the complexity of Roman slavery is provided here.) Rivalled in its openness only by Islamic mamluk “slave to lord” systems, whereby slave boys were trained as warriors, yet could come to hold an iqta tax-collecting land grant, and so be one of the lords of the realm.
It is within Islam that we first get discourses that tie colour to continental ancestry, and then to alleged moral qualities, as it is within Islam that we first get the deadly combination of universalising morality and mass slavery.
Islam holds that we are all children of Allah who should be led into the community of submission to Allah, the sovereign lawmaker of the universe. (Sharia being the human understanding of the laws of of the sovereign of the universe discerned through fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.) Sharia explicitly permits slavery. Indeed, capturing slaves was one of the benefits of engaging in jihad; in the righteous struggle to spread submission to Allah across the globe.
Slaves were, moreover, very useful. So useful, it was good to have groups permanently outside the territory of submission to Allah, so that they could be regularly enslaved. For those who have submitted to the rules of Allah could not be rightfully enslaved. But there had to be some justification for not bringing the sources of slaves within the fold of submission to Allah. The answer was, of course, that their systematic defects of character made them particularly fit for slavery.
Thus we have Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029–1070) writing in the Islamic fifth century in his (1068) Tabaqāt al-ʼUmam (Categories of Nations):
The rest of this tabaqat, which showed no interest in science, resembles animals more than human beings. Those among them who live in the extreme North, between the last of the seven regions and the end of the populated world to the north, suffered from being too far from the sun; their air is cold and their skies are cloudy. As a result, their temperament is cool and their behaviour is rude. Consequently, their bodies become enormous, their colour turned white, and their hair drooped down. They have lost keenness of understanding and sharpness of perception. They were overcome by ignorance, and laziness, and infested by fatigue and stupidity. Such are the Slavonians, Bulgarians and neighbouring peoples. (Chapter 3: Nations Having No Interest in Science).
It is amazing how stupid and lazy slave groups are so often reported to be. It is almost as if slavery is antipathetic to commitment to hard and diligent work.
This is classic denigration of a slave group because your universalist morality (they are children of Allah who should be converted to Islam, or brought within its rule) contradicts the convenience of continuing to enslave them en masse. When mass slavery later became part of their societies, societies that professed universalist moralities, Christian and Enlightenment writers responded to the same imperative in the same ways. Except, of course, they were specifically enslaving people of African origin, not Europeans as well.
Sa’id also denigrates sub-Saharan Africans for the same justifying-mass-slavery reason. He then has a problem, however, for South Asians clearly have very advanced mathematics and science but very dark skins. He wants to make it clear that they are a very different group:
The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal [essence] of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are people of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions. In spite of the fact that their color is in the first stage of blackness, which puts them in the same category as blacks, Allah in His glory, did not give them the low characteristics, the poor manners, the inferior principles associated with his group and ranked them above a large number of white and brown peoples. (Chapter 5: Science in India).
Wasn’t that good of Allah?
Race as a category flattens, indeed trivialises, human identity. This makes it ideal for any project of dehumanisation. Slavery reduces people to property, clearly a dehumanising move, but slaves also have to be managed, which creates a persistent tension in slavery between dehumanising effects and practical management and human interaction. The tension is more intense the more moral justification is required to make slavery acceptable.
Racism did not cause slavery. Slavery, in the context of universalising morality, generated justificatory classification by race (i.e. continental or sub-continental ancestry) and so racism.
About slavery
Slavery was obviously a very prominent feature of European settlement of the Americas.
This was because the spread of the Eurasian disease pool into the Americas had depopulated the Americas and meant that labour had a higher scarcity value than land. The normal historical response to labour having a higher scarcity value than land has been some sort of labour bondage.
Labour bondage is the separation of ownership of the labour services from the person doing the work. Either by banning exit from an estate without the owner’s permission (serfdom) or some form of indenture or by turning the person into property (slavery). These are all ways of creating a compulsory employer. They meant that the person doing the work could be reduced to a subsistence income while transferring the scarcity value of the labour to their compulsory employer (usually, though not always, a landowner).
Slavery and other forms of labour bondage have been ubiquitous across human civilisations, extending into modern times. The first Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union, re-introduced slavery. State-owned, slaves, of course. It did so in its labour camp system, in which coerced workers were stripped of all rights, treated as the property of the state and provided with bare subsistence. It also re-introduced serfdom. From June 1940 to April 1956, no employee could change workplace without the permission of their current workplace; the defining element of serfdom. Nazi Germany also used slave labour. North Korea still uses state slavery: indeed, effectively exports the services of slave labour.
In some parts of post-European contact Americas, the indigenous population survived the shock of the arrival of the Eurasian disease pool in sufficient numbers that a form of serfdom was imposed, the encomienda system. After 1542, it was replaced by repartimiento labour service. Generally, however, the collapse in the indigenous population of the Americas that created the resource opportunities for the incoming Europeans was so great that some form of serfdom or other labour service from local labour was not an option. Hence any bonded labour had to be imported. Thus, there was extensive use in the British American colonies of indentured labour, and convict labour. But that had various limitations, as the bondage was for limited periods of time and indentures required people to be willing to sign up for them.
The classic form of imported human bondage is, of course, slavery. Slaves are people turned into property precisely so they can be moved around at will, including being imported. Ideally, from a considerable distance, as that isolation from their place of origin made them easier to control. Having physical markers distinct from the non-slave population also made enforcing ownership somewhat easier.
Across the Atlantic from the Americas was Africa, a continent where disease, predators and megafauna (a herd of elephants can strip a farmer’s field in a few hours) meant that labour was always more scarce than land. Sub-Saharan Africa had a well-established pattern of local slavery which, with the expansion of Islam, become an extensive pattern of export of slaves. (The Sahara passage to Islamic countries was every bit as horrible as the Atlantic passage, and lasted centuries longer.)
Expanding an already existing pattern of export slavery to satisfy the demand for labour in the Americas was remarkably easy. Of course, approximately doubling the export of slaves also hugely intensified the effect of slavery on African societies.
Slavery is currently returning to Africa. (In some parts of West Africa, it never entirely vanished.) Slavery is returning as a trade into Islamic countries or in Islamic countries such as Libya. Production by slaves feeds into global supply chains, including for very prominent companies.
In the Transatlantic African slave trade, the Europeans bought slaves. They almost never did the enslaving. They didn’t need to, the infrastructure of the trade already existed. For Catholics, actively enslaving discovered peoples was banned by a 1537 Papal encyclical. (Owning or trading in slaves was fine, however.)
So began the Atlantic slave trade. The overwhelming majority of the slaves went to Brazil and the Caribbean, where the death rate of slaves was so high, they needed constant replenishing. Temperate zone North America had a much lower death rate among slaves, so (even with smuggling) it probably only received about 10 per cent of the flow of slaves across the Atlantic.
There is a simple, grim, indicator of how high the relative slave death rates were. If slaves lived and then reproduced in significant numbers, they adopted the religion of their masters. If there was much higher turnover in slaves, because of much higher death rates, then African-derived religious ideas were much stronger, as the slave population was constantly being replenished with newcomers while Christianity had less ability to take root. Hence temperate zone Americas had much higher take-up of Christianity among slaves and tropical zone Americas much more African-derived religious beliefs. A division we can still see among their descendants.
If racism and race talk in the Americas was just the legacy of slavery, it could be expected to fade as slavery recedes into the past. To a significant extent, it has in the Caribbean and Latin America. What appears to give race some continuing life, notably in Brazil, is being very class-hierarchical societies where class has a lingering continental ancestry pattern due to low levels of social mobility. Or, rather, continental ancestry patterns make it easy to see how low social mobility actually is.
This is mildly complicated by melanin count becoming a marker of status, as it is obvious that the elite are overwhelmingly of low melanin count. But this is clearly a product of the class hierarchy being made more physically visible by the patterns of continental ancestry. Plus some lingering association of sun effects on the skin with the negative status-marker of outside manual labour. Trying to analyse this class-status pattern through the prism of race is to confuse effects for cause.
What gives race talk so much more life in the US than the rest of the Americas is that slavery did not generate the only use of race talk within the US.
The ancestry problem in American colonies
At the time the British colonies in the US were being settled, European states were avidly continuing their long practice of fighting each other. The European states were not peace states that occasionally went to war, but war states which experienced intervals of peace. Hence the British conquest of Dutch and French colonies in North America.
So, as the North American colonies tried to construct new societies, there was an obvious need to create an identity that bound newcomers into the new societies without importing the rivalries of Europe. Even the British Isles had ethnic and religious fracture lines. The advent of railways and steamships from the 1820s onwards, which is when mass prosperity really began to be built, increased the scale of migration to the US and broadened its ethnic origins.
They were people from one continent (Europe) settling in, and invading, a new continent (North America) and some of whom started importing slaves from a third continent (Africa).
Continental origins were clearly in play, so continental identifiers were the obvious and easy place to go. Whites were the civilising creators of the new societies, reds were barbarians to be defeated and dispossessed and blacks were the slaves serving the white civilisers. Thus Europeans, of whatever origin, could be whites together. Provided they took appropriate steps to fit in.
Inevitably, there were complications. Such as indigenous Americans owning slaves. Race was a gloss on much deeper social patterns and racism a justification for the otherwise morally awkward bits of those patterns.
The white (and black, and red, and later yellow) terminology separated people from their history. (No-one has a continent-wide culture or history.) That made the terminology advantageous in the situation of colonial North America and the independent US. Separating people from potentially divisive European identities within a common American identity was much of the point. The American colonies, and then the United States, were creating a supergroup (to use scholar Amy Chua’s term) around the identity of white. Groups “became” white as they were absorbed into the supergroup. Whatever your European ancestry (and there was no common European identity: there was not even a common religious identity, given the post-Reformation fracturing of Christianity) folk could be “white” together.
There was also a drive by the slave-owning plantation elite to create a common “white” identity. This had begun before the Civil War, once steamships and railways had increased the rate of European migration, but took on much more urgency after the abolition of slavery. In the Antebellum South, the identity construction of race was, with some ambiguities, so as to divide poor folk of European ancestry from the slave folk of African ancestry. In the post-Reconstruction South, it was so as to divide working folk of European ancestry from working folk of African ancestry.
One can tell much about the dominant moralising of a period by what sermonising myths parading as history are popular. This is a genre with a strong tendency to the grandiose, both in moral and in explanatory pretension, flattering both author and audience. Hence its enduring appeal. The current trend is for sermonising myth with a strongly penitential air. This is epitomised by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a disingenuous exercise subject to a great deal of criticism for its distorted and highly selective take on history. (It is difficult for slavery in the US to have started in 1619 if slavery was first legally recognised in the British North American colonies in 1641.) But then, applying Adolph Reed’s principle stated above, a race-centred history of the US is going to be a unicorn history of the United States, so historiographical failures are to be expected.
If one prefers history to be an experience of genuine discovery, I can recommend Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States (2010). Part two of the book, How White People Lost Their Rhythm, explores how various groups — the Irish, the Jews and Italian-Americans — climbed the racialised hierarchy of their new land. Innovative attraction to the vitality and vibrancy of African-American music and dance by each wave of newcomers recurrently turned into rejections of such associations in the pursuit of a sober “whiteness”. A cultural supergroup identity parading as a biological one.
Fitting in meant embracing the cultural model of citizenship built on an English and Puritan cultural core: sober, hard-working, self-controlled, diligent, responsible, restrained. A self-image often not embraced by African-Americans, either during or after slavery, much to the frustration of many African-American intellectuals, including Martin Luther King. But, then, why would they embrace that constrained ideal? They were literally excluded from citizenship when slaves and functionally excluded afterwards by Jim Crow and segregation. The autonomies of pleasure provided refuges from, and rewards independent of, their social exclusions. Hence the cultural vibrancy that waves of newcomers found attractive but whose rejection facilitated inclusion in the American supergroup.
In telling the story of how various groups “achieved” “whiteness”, Russell nicely exposes a key feature of race talk: how much it is a moveable feast. What purports to be biological is very much a matter of social categorisation whose coverage shifts over time. One “rose” to whiteness in large part by one’s embrace of the sound-citizen identity. The effect was to build a supergroup; “white” Americans, who were expected to downplay their past identities in favour of their new one. To not be hyphenated Americans but members of a new-nation supergroup based in part on a double separating rejection — of the hedonistic and unruly black and the barbaric red. After the rise of Chinese immigration, it was based on a triple separating rejection — of the black, the red and the alien yellow. A created aggregation rejecting created antinomies.
There was also a heroic national myth, a sacred history, to provide a binding historical narrative. With the US Constitution being a binding civic icon and sacred object.
Creating a new national identity (and manipulating it for sectional advantage) gave race talk a power within the US that way outlived the end of slavery in 1865.
A utility that was broken, in its overtly racist forms, by the civil rights movement. (Race talk has since made a comeback in ostentatiously anti-racist form.) Martin Luther King invoked, with soaring rhetoric, the principles of the American Revolution to claim, correctly, that systematic separation of Americans of African ancestry from the political life of the United States was a profound offence against those Revolutionary principles, against the deeper story and promise of the American founding. Which, of course, it was.
This was a bid to create a new supergroup: Americans regardless of ancestry. A supergroup of all those who embraced the citizenship, principles and history of the United States. Martin Luther King did not merely want African-Americans to be full political and legal citizens, he also wanted them to be embrace the culture of citizenship. A debate that continues to rumble along.
The convenient divisive cheapness of identity politics
The Civil Rights Act 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965 coincided with the Immigration and Nationality Act 1965. The shift in migration policy proceeded to hugely complicate the ethnic make-up of the United States.
Having an inclusive politics of citizenship in a situation of increasing waves of new migrants from a wide range of countries, most obviously from Latin America, proved inherently difficult. For the migrants were not part of, but rather tended to break up, the local connections that effective citizenship and resident politics is based on. Given that the new arrivals tended to concentrate in coastal and border cities, that began to create a two-track politics in the US.
There was rural/small town/small city United States of the interior, with few ethnic minorities, who came to broadly accept the notion of a common American citizenship. A process that was easier if there was no prior history of slavery in their region. (As, in the most of the United States, there either wasn’t or else slavery had been relatively minor and locally abolished.)
Then there was the politics of metropolitan United States: ethnically diverse, dominated by an increasingly cosmopolitan elite. The trouble with citizenship politics in such a situation was (1) the increased weakness of local connections due to resident flux and (2) citizenship politics implies resident politics and working-class politics. And if you are part of the networked elite you would prefer politics not go down that path. You would much prefer politics that breaks people up into separate, and separating, identities. Just as had the plantation elite in the Antebellum and Jim Crow South.
Race talk, especially elite race talk, is a discourse of domination precisely because it divides citizens, residents and workers into separate identities. Race talk is very obviously a discourse of domination when justifying slavery. But it is also a discourse of domination when being used to, for example, create split labour markets divided by, say, melanin count.
Here’s the thing. Race talk does not have to be overtly racist to separate people. On the contrary, ostentatiously anti-racist race talk can perform exactly the same function. One simply identifies racism as a major threat, tag it as coming from a particular group, tag another group or groups as suffering under its burdens, and you are away.
It is even better if one invokes a concept of systemic or structural racism. For systemic racism, and the whole identity politics schtick, is a great way to avoid accountability. If there is this pervasive force that affects everything, then no actual decision-maker is responsible for anything. Nor is racism, with its presumptive malice, a useful term with which to tackle the legacies of past race politics. (Unless, of course, the point is to divide people.)
Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michael’s point that identity politics is class politics has a great deal of truth behind it. Throughout US history, race-talk politics, of both the explicitly racist and the ostentatiously anti-racist versions, has recurrently been elite-useful politics.
Various disparities between groups can be trotted out to “prove” that systemic racism is pervasive. Yet there are plenty of disparities between groups who have the same continental ancestries. While some previously highly discriminated against groups, such as Chinese-Americans in California or Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, now do, on average, very well.
It is perfectly true that, for example, Americans of European ancestry have an average income of $37,000 while Americans of African ancestry have an average income of $23,000, almost 40 percent lower. But Indian-Americans have an average income of $53,000, more than triple that of Burmese-Americans, who have an average income of $17,000. Nigerian-Americans have an average income of $27,000, Haitian-Americans of $18,000 and Somali-Americans of $3,000. Macedonian-Americans have an average income of $51,000, more than double that of Pennsylvanian-Dutch/German-Americans with an average income of $24,000. The disparities between groups within the same continental ancestries are hugely greater than those between aggregated continental ancestries. How long a group has been migrating to the US, the skill levels of migrants, what selection processes have been operating on who migrates; all these factors affect average incomes.
Median household income also shifts the patterns somewhat, because of differences in family size. (There are difficulties with ancestry data, but since I am only comparing it with itself, that’s fine.)
Moreover, the most common age of Euro-Americans is 58, that of African-Americans is 27. That has huge average income implications.
Pointing out the lower average income (and lower assets) of African-Americans on one hand, who make up around 13 per cent of the US population, a proportion that varies wildly depending which part of the US you are in, and then claiming that every member of the (much larger) Euro-American population (73 per cent) “benefits” from racism is nonsense on stilts. Especially as the most obvious race-based disadvantage Asian-Americans suffer from is the operation of affirmative action to benefit African-Americans.
The disparities-so-racism game may not stand up to deeper analytical scrutiny, but it is simple and rhetorically very powerful.
Moreover, systemic racism more or less immediately de-legitimises any conservative viewpoints — they are boxed away as apologists for “systemic racism”. As the politics of rural/small town/small city of the interior US can be expected to be more conservative than the politics of the increasingly cosmopolitan metropolises, systemic racism talk, as part of identity politics, becomes a rallying cry for metropolitan politics while identity politics separates the citizens, residents and workers of those metropolises into competing groups.
Hence we arrive at the phenomena of “woke capital”. The networked corporate and professional elites like identity politics just fine. None of this awkward citizen or resident or working-class politics. No, instead we have easy purchases of moral legitimacy plus a divided metropolitan citizenry, residents and working class, all at once.
Hence also the odd pattern of the Party that has for decades dominated the cities and states where minorities mostly live getting to blame the Party that runs the places where minorities mostly don’t live for any difficulties that members of the minorities may be experiencing.
A neat trick if you can pull it off. Which, with a sufficiently friendly metro media, you can.
While we could multiply examples of this “not us, honest” dynamic (who has run those police forces folk are complaining about?), affirmative action, in its operation among African-Americans, provides a nicely revealing example of the bankruptcy of race-based policies and politics.
The race-based affirmative action con job
I am deeply sceptical about the alleged value of affirmative action in higher education. Social effort would be much better directed much earlier in people’s lives.
Moreover, taking top-in-their-local-school students and positively continental-ancestry weighting their test scores so that they systematically become bottom students in their university classes is more or less bound to create aggrieved students with lots of emotionally-bruising experiences. Especially if their education actively encourages them to see every negative experience in their life as “racism”.
Allocating affirmative action by continental ancestry turns it into a transparent con-job. It does so by lumping recent African immigrants and their children, who include notably successful groups in the US (said children having already included a US President) and are not the descendants of slaves, as well as Afro-Caribbeans, who have a history of self-government after the earlier abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, with the descendants of American slaves and victims of Jim Crow, who have a very different history and burdens therefrom. (Then again, at some level, all race-based anythings are going to be a con job: remember the unicorn principle.)
One of these days, one of the major Parties may even include a descendant of American slaves on their Presidential ticket. (It hasn’t happened yet.)
The flattening away of the varying legacies people are heir to in favour of melanin count is a profound intellectual, social and moral fraud. Except, of course, pressure is put on to make sure that people do not publicly notice the racialised affirmative action con job.
Re-jigging affirmative action so that it was explicitly for the descendants of American slaves would, however, expose the emptiness of race talk, and the interlocking status, political and income-generating strategies built on it.
One of the many, many reasons Americans, and others, should stop having conversations about race.
Especially when it is used as money spinners in a burgeoning, and toxic, legitimacy-purchasing “diversity” industry. Legitimacy purchased at what might be considerable cost in team dynamics: this is not a good commercial move for a company, however advantageous it might be for morally grandstanding executives or congenial for HR and marketing folk living in social bubbles of the like-minded. Of course, if the aim is to discourage unionisation, then encouraging workers to think of themselves as divided by identity groups may well be helpful.
But while spending vast sums on toxic anti-training may be the most grotesque manifestation of having conversations about unicorns, aka race, it is not remotely the worst or most potentially disastrous.
For if there is no common citizenship, no common heritage, no common principles, then there is nothing to sustain a common nationhood. And if differentiation by constant allegations of pervasive racism, of pervasive oppressive malice, for malice is what the term racism invokes, are used to build careers and protect (and so also deny) access to status and resources, then becoming the violently Dis-United States becomes that much easier.
The United States has already had one Civil War over protecting status and access to resources via exploitative differentiation of people by continental ancestry. Sliding into another one because an academic, professional and corporate elite finds identity politics a convenient path to gain, and retain, access to status and resources would be a world-class tragedy.
Race flattens and trivialises human identity, hence its facility for dehumanisation. The two groups most obsessed about race — woke progressives (or PC authoritarians) and white identitarians — share more than an obsession with a concept ideal for dehumanisation. A recent study has found that (pdf) both groups share similarly elevated rates of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy (the Dark Triad) plus entitlement. If what you see most about other people is their race, then you see their humanity that much less. Of course that is a viewpoint that attracts manipulative, self-serving and entitled personalities.
The words of the former slave and playwright Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence, echo down to us:
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.)
In a tweet of 31 August 2020, an anonymous person presenting as a parent of children of mixed continental ancestry expresses a hope that we should all embrace:
I want them to be the generation that at last transcends the limiting and soul-destroying American “skin game”.
We all urgently need to stop having conversations about race and start taking our common humanity, and the realities of specific legacies, much more seriously.
Cross-posted from Medium.
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